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May 15, 2006

On Approximating Cady Noland

Triple Candie's current tribute to Cady Noland seeks to redress her total absense from the art scene for over a decade. And yet this curatorial attempt at "call-and-response" has been cast by Jerry Saltz as art world "identity theft" and by Ken Johnson as "confusing and duplicitous" in their recent reviews in the Village Voice and the NYTimes respectively.

Tom Moody reports:

4-19-2006 11:59 amVia MTAA comes the news that Harlem gallery Triple Candie is doing a Cady Noland survey show,
consisting of re-creations of her past artworks based on the Internet
and other documentary sources. The re-creations are not approved by
Noland, who "dropped out" of the art world in the mid '90s but "tightly
controls" her work; this is not to say she disapproves--according to the press release she simply "was not consulted or notified."

Noland
is a proto-slacker, neo-scatter artist whose themes are consumerism,
nihilism, and politics as refracted through tabloid media; she achieved
instant notoriety in the late '80s/early '90s with installations of
beer cans, machine parts, and other urban or post-industrial detritus.
Triple Candie sees her as an influence on a large range of current
artists, including Wade Guyton, Sarah Lucas, and Banks Violette.

I'm curious what Noland's reaction to this will be. The press release
says she "haunts the art world like a ghost" while scrupulously
limiting the exhibition and publication of her work. This project is
kind of fascinating coming so soon after Jack Pierson pitched a fit
over the sign letter sculptures at Barneys that resemble his
conceptualist/assemblage works. Pierson followed Noland in the art
world's every-couple-of-years "new car rollout" hype cycle (both showed
at the influential American Fine Arts gallery), but he stayed in the
game and became a successful market entity. Does she care that Triple
Candie is doing this? Would she have the clout or stamina to stop
faithful re-creations of her work (as opposed to a mere
window-dresser's homage)?

Ken Johnson of the New York Times yesterday criticized the
gallery Triple Candie for its show of Cady Noland re-creations. His
review appears to contain significant factual errors, based on what I
learned from a call to the gallery. For example, was Cady Noland
contacted about the show before they did it? The gallery says no.
Johnson says she was, and that she "rebuffed" the gallery. Where did he
get this information? Also, he says Triple Candie was similarly
rebuffed by David Hammons about doing a show of his work before they
went ahead and did it, also apparently not true. These facts are
important because Johnson's review reads like a smear job on the
gallerists, suggesting they do shows motivated by personal spite.
Here's what the Times published: [Link]

[...] The show isn't just about creating a room of uncanny perfect copies, a
la Sturtevant's Duchamps. It's also about whether recreating an art
based on past ephemera is possible. And of course, whether the
participation of the artist is essential in displaying work based on
available materials. The artists have published detailed notes of how
much or how little they were able to redo given their budget and the
vagaries of finding (or re-finding) manufactured items from 20 years
ago. They are completely up front in the press release that these
pictures are based on, among other things, pictures on the Internet. In his hatchet job on the show, New York Times
critic Ken Johnson doesn't mention that the Web was one of the sources
used, thus writing out of history the rather important theme of how we
rely on Google seaches and cyber-facsimiles to give us our sense of
history. It's quite possible that the photos above will show up in
Google Images next to jpegs of actual Nolands. Is that good? Bad?
Johnson doesn't go there.

An odd contradiction in Johnson's review:
in the first paragraph he mentions that Triple Candie is a non-profit
gallery, and then later says the show "might raise questions about art
and commerce" (that is, if the gallerists didn't have such bad
motives). He is projecting a set of intentions on them that differs
from the ones they announced, and then slamming them for failing (or is
it not failing?) to live up to them. [...]

[...] Boycott Triple Candie? That has got to be the most obscenely
stupid thing I have ever heard. What are you going to do? Stop not
giving them money? Stop not bringing all your friends to the openings?
Stop not helping them install shows? Great. I can't wait to not see you
around there anymore. With friends like you, who needs friends?

It
saddens me to see fans and writers and critics displaying such a lack
of flexibility when it comes to engaging the topic of replication,
reproduction, approximation in absentia, ... alternative modes of
production, folks. It's not like we haven't been here before. A million
goddamn times.

What interests me is how exciting this feels. I
haven't been this excited about a show and its ramifications in a very
long time. [...]

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On Approximating Cady Noland

Triple Candie's current tribute to Cady Noland seeks to redress her total absense from the art scene for over a decade. And yet this curatorial attempt at "call-and-response" has been cast by Jerry Saltz as art world "identity theft" and by Ken Johnson as "confusing and duplicitous" in their recent reviews in the Village Voice and the NYTimes respectively.

Tom Moody reports:

4-19-2006 11:59 amVia MTAA comes the news that Harlem gallery Triple Candie is doing a Cady Noland survey show,
consisting of re-creations of her past artworks based on the Internet
and other documentary sources. The re-creations are not approved by
Noland, who "dropped out" of the art world in the mid '90s but "tightly
controls" her work; this is not to say she disapproves--according to the press release she simply "was not consulted or notified."

Noland
is a proto-slacker, neo-scatter artist whose themes are consumerism,
nihilism, and politics as refracted through tabloid media; she achieved
instant notoriety in the late '80s/early '90s with installations of
beer cans, machine parts, and other urban or post-industrial detritus.
Triple Candie sees her as an influence on a large range of current
artists, including Wade Guyton, Sarah Lucas, and Banks Violette.

I'm curious what Noland's reaction to this will be. The press release
says she "haunts the art world like a ghost" while scrupulously
limiting the exhibition and publication of her work. This project is
kind of fascinating coming so soon after Jack Pierson pitched a fit
over the sign letter sculptures at Barneys that resemble his
conceptualist/assemblage works. Pierson followed Noland in the art
world's every-couple-of-years "new car rollout" hype cycle (both showed
at the influential American Fine Arts gallery), but he stayed in the
game and became a successful market entity. Does she care that Triple
Candie is doing this? Would she have the clout or stamina to stop
faithful re-creations of her work (as opposed to a mere
window-dresser's homage)?

Ken Johnson of the New York Times yesterday criticized the
gallery Triple Candie for its show of Cady Noland re-creations. His
review appears to contain significant factual errors, based on what I
learned from a call to the gallery. For example, was Cady Noland
contacted about the show before they did it? The gallery says no.
Johnson says she was, and that she "rebuffed" the gallery. Where did he
get this information? Also, he says Triple Candie was similarly
rebuffed by David Hammons about doing a show of his work before they
went ahead and did it, also apparently not true. These facts are
important because Johnson's review reads like a smear job on the
gallerists, suggesting they do shows motivated by personal spite.
Here's what the Times published: [Link]

[...] The show isn't just about creating a room of uncanny perfect copies, a
la Sturtevant's Duchamps. It's also about whether recreating an art
based on past ephemera is possible. And of course, whether the
participation of the artist is essential in displaying work based on
available materials. The artists have published detailed notes of how
much or how little they were able to redo given their budget and the
vagaries of finding (or re-finding) manufactured items from 20 years
ago. They are completely up front in the press release that these
pictures are based on, among other things, pictures on the Internet. In his hatchet job on the show, New York Times
critic Ken Johnson doesn't mention that the Web was one of the sources
used, thus writing out of history the rather important theme of how we
rely on Google seaches and cyber-facsimiles to give us our sense of
history. It's quite possible that the photos above will show up in
Google Images next to jpegs of actual Nolands. Is that good? Bad?
Johnson doesn't go there.

An odd contradiction in Johnson's review:
in the first paragraph he mentions that Triple Candie is a non-profit
gallery, and then later says the show "might raise questions about art
and commerce" (that is, if the gallerists didn't have such bad
motives). He is projecting a set of intentions on them that differs
from the ones they announced, and then slamming them for failing (or is
it not failing?) to live up to them. [...]

[...] Boycott Triple Candie? That has got to be the most obscenely
stupid thing I have ever heard. What are you going to do? Stop not
giving them money? Stop not bringing all your friends to the openings?
Stop not helping them install shows? Great. I can't wait to not see you
around there anymore. With friends like you, who needs friends?

It
saddens me to see fans and writers and critics displaying such a lack
of flexibility when it comes to engaging the topic of replication,
reproduction, approximation in absentia, ... alternative modes of
production, folks. It's not like we haven't been here before. A million
goddamn times.

What interests me is how exciting this feels. I
haven't been this excited about a show and its ramifications in a very
long time. [...]